“I will have to admit that I don't understand this story. If I were trying to steal votes for the Democrats, this is not the way I would go about doing it.”
http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2008/10/acorn-new-republican-talking-point.html
This isn’t hard to grasp, Victor. Voter fraud can be quite successful. It goes like this:
i) By the time it takes to investigate and prosecute voter fraud, the fraudulent votes have already been cast. So the fraudulent outcome is irreversible.
ii) A party that successfully steals an election through voter fraud becomes the party responsible for investigating and prosecuting voter fraud. And the party in power has a disincentive to indict itself for voter fraud.
If you’re still too dense to see how it works, study the electoral process under Vladimir Putin.
Reppert is a good example of how a stupid worldview can make smart men stupid.
"Reppert is a good example of how a stupid worldview can make smart men stupid."
ReplyDeleteSteve, that's a jarringly good and snappy one-liner. Mind if I steal it without attribution?
The reason I was asking was because if I were going to engage in voter fraud I would not use the well-known names of the Dallas Cowboys that would immediately put up a red flag to any football fan who happens to be noticing. Were these people trying to get caught?
ReplyDeleteWho says that's the only names they used?
ReplyDeleteBe that as it may, as an author I know that it can be difficult to invent plausible names for characters. It's a lot easier to pick up a phone book and just use names from there...or perhaps pick up a roster from the Dallas Cowboys.
And yes, diverting people with obvious names can help to obscure other less obvious false names. Throw enough snow to blind people in a blizzard and you can sneak something by them. That is, if you're Manchurian enough to think that way (as seems to be a prerequisite for campaign managers).
The odds of even being caught sneaking in a fake name in a precinct that doesn't check ID in the first place are extremely low. Secondly, even if you catch someone after they vote, how do you prove which candidate they voted for with their fraudulent vote? The fact is every fraudulent voter takes the vote away from someone who voted opposite of them. And in close elections, where the country is split 48% - 44%, a few fraudulent votes in key states is all you need to discredit the entire process.
Of course, this could all be avoided if we simply required an ID to vote. You know, kinda like we require an ID to get on an airplane, or a license to drive (or even to hunt), etc.
It rather says something, don't you think, that the party who doesn't want to enact ID laws is the same party that gains the most from fraudulent voting practices. Almost like they know their base is fake.
Good think we have the unbiased NYT to sort things out for us and show how it's really Palin's fault.
victor reppert said...
ReplyDelete“The reason I was asking was because if I were going to engage in voter fraud I would not use the well-known names of the Dallas Cowboys that would immediately put up a red flag to any football fan who happens to be noticing. Were these people trying to get caught?”
No, the reason you were asking was to pooh-pooh the story.
The fact that some low-level ACORN volunteers are inept doesn’t mean that ACORN isn’t trying to steal the election for Obama.
This isn’t just a “Republican talking-point.” This is under official investigation in several states, including by Democrat state officials.
And voter fraud can be quite easy to perpetrate—depending on state law. Back when I was living in SoCal, poll workers were forbidden to ask (much less demand) proof of identification when someone signed their name.
That’s because Democrats wanted illegal aliens to vote on ballot issues.
I was not trying to pooh-pooh the story. I wanted an answer. Peter Pike made a serious response to my question, to which I am grateful.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what to think about it. Someone on my site did attempt to debunk the story.
ACORN's official response to the story suggests that it was ACORN itself that was defrauded. They paid people in good faith to get authentic registrations, and some of their employees faked the signatures in order to get a paycheck. It was ACORN itself that reported most of these inauthentic registrations, and fired the employees who filed them.
ReplyDeleteWhat on earth makes you folks think that anyone will ever obtain these fake voter registrations and show up under these assumed names to vote? You need an actual human being to show up under the names of every fake registration for voter registration fraud to turn into voter fraud. So how can this be an attempt on ACORN's part to steal the election? If they had an actual human being willing to go to the polls for every fake name they had, why would they need the fake names? They could just register those same people legally. The conspiracy theory you folks are dreaming up makes no sense at all. Victor's too nice to tell you the argument you're making makes you look like an imbecile, but I was not born with his restraint, nor have I attained it through modest effort.
Victor's not the one whose worldview is making them stupid on this issue.
Anonymous said:
ReplyDelete---
You need an actual human being to show up under the names of every fake registration for voter registration fraud to turn into voter fraud.
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Hi clueless,
Ever hear of absentee ballots? All you need to do is match up the name and address you registered with.
HEY! Insta-fraud right there.
And your claim about ACORN being duped is a bit like saying: "The thiefs claim that they are really the victims since they didn't realize the necklace they pulled out of the jewelry case actually belonged to the owner of the store."
Hey nincompoop,
ReplyDeleteIn just about every state an absentee ballot requires a separate registration which you must apply for. On that separate form, you must provide an address for where the absentee ballot must be mailed.
So, before you typed up your last response, you might have asked yourself what good it does to have an absentee ballot mailed to a non-existent address?
Even if the ACORN defrauding employees had existing addresses to send the absentee ballot to, you're just replacing the need to have a body for every fraudulent vote with the need of having an authentic out of state address for every fraudulent vote. And that is even more difficult to achieve, and requires even more irrationality to bring oneself to believe ACORN is actually attempting to do.
Again, Reppert is not the one whose ideology is making them look like morons on this particular issue. The slightest amount of applied critical thinking would have immediately revealed to you that voter registration fraud does not in any way equate to voter fraud. But, as this blog in particular has made clear over the past few months, no argument against Obama is so fallacious, so wrong-headed, and so implausible that it can't be believed.
Hi again clueless,
ReplyDeleteYou said:
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In just about every state an absentee ballot requires a separate registration which you must apply for. On that separate form, you must provide an address for where the absentee ballot must be mailed.
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Yes, and there are plenty of ways to get around this too. No one checks to see if someone really l8lives at the address they put unles there's a scandal. But how do you know there's a scandal? (One way to start: is ACORN involved? If yes, then there's a scandal.)
Thus you say:
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Even if the ACORN defrauding employees had existing addresses to send the absentee ballot to, you're just replacing the need to have a body for every fraudulent vote with the need of having an authentic out of state address for every fraudulent vote.
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As if that's in any way a problem.
There are also states that require someone to prove that another person lives in-state, and the "proof" is that they have to have someone who can prove they live in-state say: "This guy lives in my home." And there are websites already set up with people who are willing to do that for ANYONE regardless of where they live.
Again, until ID is required for everyone to vote, then fraud not only can happen but WILL happen. ACORN enables it both by A) creating a massive blizzard of waste, tying up resources and bogging down election officials; and B) claiming disenfranchisement whenever their practices are exposed as fraudulent because Mickey Mouse wants to vote.
There's a reason that it's a felony to sign up false names for registration. That reason is because it enables voter fraud. It is not itself voter fraud, but it is the necessary first step.
You said:
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But, as this blog in particular has made clear over the past few months, no argument against Obama is so fallacious, so wrong-headed, and so implausible that it can't be believed.
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Since we've not presented any fallacious, wrong-headed, or implausible arguments against Obama, that's no argument against us. You, on the other hand, are just emoting like a typical liberal pansy who has no oxygen to his brain. (And you know it too, as you hide behind anonymity, as all good liberal cowards do.)
Note that your position is so secure you have to defend felonies and pretend they're no big deal. Note that the same camp who bitches about Florida in 2000 suddenly can't seem to find anything wrong with paying people to sign up their name multiple times or faking registrations. Because no crime is prosecutable if it offends our Obamessiah.
No one checks to see if someone really l8lives at the address they put unless there's a scandal.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't matter. The absentee ballot has to be mailed out to the address given. If the address doesn't exist, no one gets the absentee ballot, and nobody uses it to vote.
It's not brain surgery.
As if that's in any way a problem.
It is a problem, given you need someone living at the address to fill out the ballot for the candidate of choice. So this would require a "vast left-wing conspiracy", consisting at least of a network of TENS OF THOUSANDS of homeowners (in other words, people who more than likely have families and jobs) who have signed up to commit felonies for Obama. And since there's absolutely no evidence for that, why would any thinking, rational person believe it?
And there are websites already set up with people who are willing to do that for ANYONE regardless of where they live.
Really? Show me one. Just one.
Again, until ID is required for everyone to vote, then fraud not only can happen but WILL happen.
There's a less sinister rationale behind the opposition to requiring picture ID to vote. This would mostly affect minorities and people who live in big cities who don't need and thus don't have drivers liscences due to their exclusive use of public transportation. These people thus quite often don't have state-issued picture ID. Requiring it would prevent many of them from voting, and that just because of the mere suspicion that some small number of them may be committing voter fraud. I agree with the Democrats rationale: in a democracy, you don't prevent 10 people from voting because of the risk that 1 of them might be committing voter fraud.
There's another side to this coin, though. Voter suppression. It's a known fact that Democrats and Independents outnumber Republicans by a significant margin, and that big turnout is always trouble for Republican candidates. So there's good and bad motivations all around here. Democrats have an interest in increasing turnout, whether through scrupulous or unscrupulous means, and Republicans have an interest in decreasing turnout, whether through scrupulous or unscrupulous means. So the key in determining whether or not fraud or suppression has occurred isn't just-so stories about what someone might do, it's the available evidence.
So far, the available evidence only shows that lazy ACORN employees took ACORN's money and gave them fake registrations instead of doing their work. ACORN turned in all those fake names and turned the employees who provided them over to the police. So what is the evidence that ACORN is involved in voter fraud?
There is none.
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/wireStory?id=6049549
ReplyDeleteThat video has nothing to do with the discussion at hand. That people in that video have nothing to do with ACORN, or Obama. They cited one case of one guy who lives in Oxford but voted in Ohio. That kid could have voted for McCain, for all we know.
ReplyDeleteI never said that voter fraud was impossible or nonexistent. I said it was irrational to believe that the kind of widespread voter registration fraud that ACORN has uncovered would lead to equally widespread voter fraud by ACORN. Nothing in that video disputes my position.
A couple of college kids can turn voter registration fraud into voter fraud easily. For them, turning voter registration fraud into voter fraud only required them to use one out of town address: their own. For ACORN to similarly on a massive scale, would require them to have willing agents in TENS OF THOUSANDS of addresses all over the world. You kind of have to be an idiot to believe that they actually have such a network, and were committing voter registration fraud in order to acquire absentee ballots to send to this invisible voter fraud army. There's no evidence for that.
So, congratulations, you found an incident of voter fraud. But you have to watch Foxnews an awful lot for your brain to have atrophied to the point where you think that video in any way supports your case. Which, you know, maybe you have.
Anonymous said:
ReplyDelete---
That kid could have voted for McCain, for all we know.
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I.e. "That fraud stuff doesn't matter as long as Obamessiah gets elected. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along."
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I never said that voter fraud was impossible or nonexistent. I said it was irrational to believe that the kind of widespread voter registration fraud that ACORN has uncovered would lead to equally widespread voter fraud by ACORN.
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ACORN uncovered nothing. Spit out the Kool-Aid before your brain melts. ACORN has a vested interest in promoting the candidate who paid them $800,000. They have a vested interest in promoting the candidate their "political" wing endorses. They have a vested interest in promoting the candidate who engaged in legal action on their behalf in the past.
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A couple of college kids can turn voter registration fraud into voter fraud easily. For them, turning voter registration fraud into voter fraud only required them to use one out of town address: their own.
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Except it wasn't their own. It was a temporary address set up by a group intending to defraud the system. It's not that hard when you have dumb laws like Ohio passed, enabling registration and voting at the same time.
You're complete incompetence and inability to reason is not helping your position.
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For ACORN to similarly on a massive scale, would require them to have willing agents in TENS OF THOUSANDS of addresses all over the world.
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Not at all. Bush won Florida by less than 500 votes. One person at one address who was not investigated because the election officials are terrified of lawsuits saying they're racists for disenfranchizing the fraudulent voters could get away with it.
And you fail to underestimate how many people are willing to do whatever it takes for their candidate to win.
Furthermore, you continually turn your brain off and don't realize that the solution I stated so long ago to Victor Reppert WOULD RENDER THIS PROBLEM MOOT.
It wouldn't matter how many fake registrations there were if ID was required before voting could occur.
As it is, ACORN and the Chosen One have messed with so much in this election that regardless of who wins no one is going to believe it's a legit election.
Finally, you say that the problem isn't widespread. Yet it takes a handful of college students less than a week to uncover this. What are the odds that they would just happen to find the ONLY place it was occuring that quickly?
If the MSM wasn't in the tank so obviously for Obama, they'd see there's actual NEWS here. Instead, they're too busy checking Joe the Plummer's tax record to care about whether Obama is committing RICO offenses in conducting a conspiracy using his blessed "community organizers" to get out the fraud vote. No, we must crucify the little guy who's not running for anything because he asked a simple question that Obama accidentally answered truthfully instead.
That's why, as I've said before, regardless of who wins this election, the media has been proven incompetent baffoons. I can only conclude based on your reasoning skills that you're a reporter for the New York Times (All The News That's Fit to Fake).
Don't worry. I still blame Bush. And Global Warming.